Hello, I'm Kresti Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2002, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a scientist, a Nobel Prize winner, Knighted for his services to the study of cancer,

and now at the head of Britain's most important cancer charity, he's climbed a long ladder to be where he is today.

His love of the natural world was his inspiration when as a working-class boy he made his way

to school in North London.

Later as a research scientist his decision to study yeast

which caused laughter among his colleagues laid the foundations for his discoveries

about how human cells multiply.

His work has led to an understanding

of the molecular structure of cancer.

He discovered these things because he says

he really wanted to know, and as he adds,

because of the beauty of it he is Sir Paul nurse is that

Paul the beauty of the biology itself or the beauty of the discovery it's really

both I think the discovery. It's really both. I think the discovery process in science and

actually finding out something that is new that nobody else has ever even

dreamt of before is one of the most amazing things that a human

being can do. To sit there looking at a new land that nobody has ever seen is

just it's like being an explorer in the Amazonian jungle or in the Antarctic so

it's absolutely amazing but also that the process itself can be beautiful you can do

beautiful experiments you can be beautiful. You can do beautiful experiments. You can have

...